Tahiti – Voyage Through Paradise – The story of a smallboat passage through the Society Islands ; By George T. Eggleston Robert Hale, London, 1955, hard cover, blue cloth, gilt lettering to spine, map endpapers, a near very good copy (small sticker on front paste-down endpaper) in like dust wrapper, 191pp with frontispiece and 37 illustrations.

Tahiti, Principal Island in the Society group, lies 2,300 miles due south of Hawaii. Captain Cook and de Bougainville voyaged there; Charles Darwin observed the flora and fauna; Gauguin’s Tahitian paintings are renowned; and Melville, Stevenson and Jack London have all written in praise of the wonder of the last unspoiled paradise in the South Pacific. Realizing a life-long ambition, Eggleston, on a leave of absence from business, decided to see for himself these islands – each a paradise – which he had read about in the works of the few lucky individuals who had preceeded him. He and his wife chartered a thirty-two-foot sailing schooner at Papeete, Tahiti, and set out for one thousand moles of island-hopping, poking in and out of places few other had ever seen. Eggleston took pictures – candid and unposed – as he went, and the result is a magnificent collection of photographs of singular beauty. Visiting the nine principal islands in the Society group and continuing as far as Rarotonga, chief of the Cook group, 500 miles distant; the account of their welcome and stay on these islands makes fascinating reading.

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